I need to get a hobby.

I've been reading a book lately. Before I'm charged with egotism, there's a reason I'm reading my own book and why I'm leading off with it. Besides if I don't read this book no one else will. 

In that same vein I decided to photograph the book with one of my happy-hands-at-home business cards, hawking my oh-so-popular equally handcrafted T-Shirts. Which have become quite popular with the chatty blue hairs at the Duarte Fitness Center who gather at noon in the shallow end of the pool and yack. 

I call them the Ladies That Bob.

BTW, I sold a shirt last week. This one always gets a good laugh.

The Big Book of Rants, if you haven't read it and I know you haven't because I have boxes of unsold books in my garage, is a compilation of essays I've written on these very pages over the past 17 years about advertising. 

I know this will sound impolite or a tad narcissistic, but in the rereading of what I had written a long, long time ago, I found myself smiling. And laughing. And satisfyingly impressed with what I had committed to digital ink.

But here's the deal. While I have been out of advertising for close to three years, advertising is not out of me. Not by a long shot. And by that I mean, I have been plagued by a nightly string of stress dreams.

Like the business itself, it is fucking relentless.

I'm sure this happens to you, but I don't always remember the details or even the plot of the dreams. A task made harder when I am awakened and find myself drenched in a cold sweat. But last night's episode was particularly frustrating.

I was back at Chiat/Day (big surprise) and charged with writing a campaign for a trucking company, a very specialized trucking company whose self proclaimed mission was to deliver children's cough medicine to our nationwide network of Walgreens and CVS Pharmacies. As is my nature I ignored the brief and wrote some cute and funny spots about kids coughing.

"No," said Lee Clow (my former boss, who makes many appearances in my dreams), "It's not the coughing, or even the drug stores, it's about getting the medicine where it needs to go. Jesus Siegel!"

Wow, in the pantheon of tough advertising assignments, this one was easily circling near the top.

Only to be surpassed by a dream I had last week, wherein we were pitching the Mazda account. My hard-to-please boss in this case was a mustachioed little man named Adolf Hitler. 

"Ve must take Subaru and all of Mitsubishi!"

WTF!

You can't write this stuff. 

But apparently the crazy and masochistic monster that lives inside my head, did.